Irvine CA 2014 Access Day Presenters

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

TOPIC:Client/Server Development Techniques Every Access Developer Should Know

Many people believe that Access is not a good client/server development tool. I couldn’t disagree more! Using the correct techniques, you can create powerful and robust client/server applications that take advantage of Access’s rich GUI and SQL Server’s powerful database engine. During this session you will learn to use a combination of linked tables, Access queries, and SQL Server views, stored procedures, and functions to successfully design client/server solutions. After attending this session, you will be ready to take Access to its limits as a corporate development tool.

Alison Balter is a leading author of Microsoft Access books and SQL Server books, including Access 2013 Absolute Beginners Guide, Alison Balter’s Mastering Access 2007 Development, Teach Yourself SQL Server 2005 Express in 24 Hours, a developer video training series on Access 2013, and a user video training series on Access 2013, all for SAMS Publishing. She also authored an Access Developer video series for Experts Exchange where she also has published numerous articles.

Alison is a highly experienced developer and independent trainer. She loves to take highly technical material and explain it in a way that everyone can understand. Alison develops applications using Access and SQL Server. She specializes in teaching others how to develop Windows and Web applications. During her 27 years in the computer industry, she has trained and consulted many people in corporations and government agencies, including Southern California Edison, Shell Oil, Cisco, University of Southern California, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On a personal note, Alison enjoys spending time with her husband Dan, and children Alexis and Brendan. They all love to travel, ski (snow and water), and hike. Alison also likes walking, yoga, and weight lifting.

It’s been just over a year since Access Services 2013 has been publicly available on Office 365. In that time the Access team has been working away at making the service more robust. In this session we will walk through some of the subtle and not so subtle changes that have been deployed… and one special one that is coming soon.

Kevin Bell is a test engineer on the Microsoft Access team in Redmond Washington. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008, Kevin was a partner in a consulting practice that specialized in building custom software solutions, primarily with Microsoft Access connected to a SQL Server backend. Over a 15+ year consulting career he has created a variety of applications from a management system for a small drapery shop with a handful of users, to a compliance tracking system for a large insurance company with hundreds of users in multiple locations.

Like many Access Developers, Kevin’s career with Access started by accident. While working in Melbourne, Australia for an illumination engineering firm, he started modernizing the company’s testing reports using Microsoft Excel. Excel offered a rich presentation layer, but it wasn’t very efficient at managing large amounts of data. Databases at the time lacked graphical capabilities and Microsoft’s newly released Visual Basic lacked database support. Then Access 1.0 arrived, combining the best elements of all three, and Kevin was hooked.

Over the years Kevin has been a member, officer and frequent presenter at the Denver Area Access User Group and now regularly attends the Pacific Northwest Access Developers Group. He has also presented at the UK Access Group National Seminar, and at the Portland Access User Group Spring Conference.

Access Web Apps present a challenge for many developers – how do they fit into the spectrum of business solutions? In this talk, George will review the critiques of Access Web Apps, and then demonstrate various ways to extend them well beyond SharePoint/Office 365, including to a full Access 2013 Client application, an Excel Workbook, an ASP.NET MVC Web Application, and an ASP.NET Web API service driving a Windows 8 application.

George first encountered Microsoft Access when using the early versions of Office to teach Statistics and MIS in the early 1990’s. It’s been true love ever since! George has worked as a software developer for the past twenty years, including twelve at Microsoft (in just about every group other than Office). He is currently an independent consultant living at 6700 feet in Castle Rock, Colorado, working primarily on .NET applications. George still has a commercial site or two that is driven by an Access database sitting in the server file system.

Armen will present tips and tricks for making your Access applications more robust and easier for your users. Topics covered will include navigation techniques, database design ideas and UI improvements. Example code will be available to attendees.

Armen Stein is the founder and president of J Street Technology, a Microsoft Partner located near Seattle. J Street is a team of developers with expertise in custom Access desktop and ASP.NET web applications. Armen is a Microsoft Certified Professional and an Access MVP, and has spoken at many user groups and conferences, including Microsoft TechEd, Office DevCon in Australia, the PAUG Conference, and the UK Access User Group in London. Armen is co-author of Access 2007 VBA Programmer’s Reference (Wrox). His other interests include travel, photography, backgammon, movies, and driving his 1969 Ford Bronco in the sun.

When you develop Access client applications with a SQL Server back-end you will run into error messages from ODBC. Some of them are cryptic even to developers, let alone end users. They are also notoriously difficult to handle. For bound forms the Form_Error event gives very little information. For unbound scenarios the Errors collection is better, but you are still stuck with cryptic messages. In this talk we will present an integrated way to deal with ODBC errors: how to intercept them and how to transform them into user-friendly messages. The details are interesting and somewhat complex, but abstracted away for those developers who just want to get things done. 2 lines of code is all that it takes.

Tom is the software development manager for Kinetik I.T., a premier provider of Website Design, SEO Internet Marketing, Software Development and Computer Network Services & Solutions in Phoenix, AZ. Tom is an occasional speaker and contributor to books on Access and SQL Server. In the cooler months he likes hiking and biking, and pinot noir throughout the year.